The field of the invention relates generally to management of computer devices and, more particularly, to network-based systems and methods for scanning computer devices to collect inventory data including hardware and software objects associated with the computer devices.
At least some known computing infrastructures for medium to large business entities include hundreds or thousands of computer devices, from mission-critical servers hosting production applications to personal computers (PCs) used by support personnel. Managing such computing infrastructures requires knowledge of the types of hardware and software objects deployed across the environment. Asset managers oftentimes need to maintain inventory information on the computing devices in service, and need to track devices as they enter and exit service. System administrators may need to track operating system versions and patch levels for the computing devices, as well as which applications and versions are installed on each computing device.
One known method of maintaining such inventory information is the manual tracking and recording of information in a spreadsheet or a database. Tracking asset information manually can be significantly time consuming, and is subject to human error. Further, changes in the infrastructure lead to stale data that may not be immediately corrected, and may go unrealized for long periods of time. Other known methods of maintaining inventory information utilize inventory management applications. Such approaches often require purchasing a management product, and installing a pre-compiled agent on each computing device in the infrastructure. These agents may not be available for all operating systems present in an infrastructure. When these agents are installed, these known agents are oftentimes not customizable enough for certain tasks, and typically impact the computational capacity of the hosts on which they run.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a tool set that can be deployed onto each computing device such that each computing device can then execute a common scan program to collect similar inventory data, with minimal computational overhead on the executing host.